Here we go...
We got back from our trip to the panhandle of Texas a couple days ago. It was, like all the summer trips we make to the Harrison Farm, a hot and sweaty affair. They are full of bugs of many kinds, often in the house (this year I was calling it a "mothpocalyspe"), as well as full of love. All of Corrie's siblings made it, save for her older brother Rob, but it was a great time. Michael, Corrie's sister's husband, and I catered a few days of events as well.
Getting there is always part of our adventure, and this year proved no different. For an hour, maybe, driving through Arizona, the following storm was visible from the road:
Looks crazy!
Then I had to drive through it.
That was less fun. More white-knuckle, 30 mph putt-puttering through near zero visibility and trying to limit the hydroplaning. But still, we made it to Gallup, and our hotel of choice in that great rez metropolis, the El Rancho, hotel to the Hollywood stars of the great Westerns era:
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| An exterior shot of the premises; cute |
And...we took Picasso, our cat. He enjoyed being a farm cat, as he always does.
We let him roam during the day most days early in the trip, but leaving the door open late into the night with alight on proved a bad idea, what with the moths, mosquitoes, hornets, and wasps.
The sunsets to the west are usually incredible, but this. year we were limited because of clouds...but not every day:
Picasso loved that window, paying special attention in the pre-seven am hours and sleeping later once it got hot:
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| Another day, another window sill nap |
The grainery in Clarendon is the biggest building in the town, and can be spotted early on the road to town, and easily from most spots, even the parking lot to the Lowes/Ace Hardware grocery store/hardware store in town:
The farm pickup truck, Old Blue, seems to have been driven to this spot a few, er, seasons ago and hasn't moved since. Gas or battery issues, I guess:
The Farm is a place where the work never ends. It's a vacation, yes, but not in the sense of "let's go to the beach and relax with mai-tais all day." It's more like a transportation back to the nineteenth century. You have a building to sleep in, sure, but you're kinda at the mercy of the elements. It's relentlessly hot, and occasionally inside the kitchen is the hottest place. With all the work that needs to happen, and the spotty wi-fi, you find yourself using your phone less and less, hence the above collection may exhaust my "nice" pictures from the trip. I wasn't snapping pictures away, but I'm not the best for that enterprise anyway.
This iteration of the Harrison/Dolman Reunion was held at a school in Hedley, Texas. The school was a high school basketball powerhouse in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '90s and early aughts. It's crazy. Corrie's brother Pete and I examined the extensive trophy cabinet one afternoon.
This is the first year that there won't be any high school students, as the space will accommodate only K-6 and still have less than 200 students.
Cass, Uncle Joey and I shot hoops for a while in the darkened gym until we were yelled at. Michael and I made burgers in their awesome school kitchen, as professional a kitchen as either of have worked in in decades. Pete, Michael, Joey, and I made a brisket in Pete's fancy new digital smoker, and it was fantastic.
One day in particular I felt like I should write about. A day begins at 12 midnight. On this particular day, around 12:30 am, two large projects were started simultaneously: the brisket clean up and marination start; and the pottery glaze mixing.
Corrie's dad, Ron, kept a watchful eye on me and my carving of the raw briskets, taking just the right amount of fat off, and then preparing the correct marinade. That sentence, while easy to type, in real life took at least an hour. Once the meat was trimmed properly, washed, placed into the tough bag inside the cooler, the marinade was prepared. Once it gets put into the bag and onto the meat, the massage starts, the bag gets tied, and the ice goes in. Now every few hours until it goes into the smoker it needs to be massaged and flipped.
At the same time Ron and I were starting the meat, Corrie started sifting one of the two fifteen-pound bags of glaze into one of the five-gallon buckets mostly full of water. The sifting takes time, and I even spelled her with the second fifteen-pound bag and second five-gallon bucket of water.
In the past I've talked about scientific magic (photography, baby!), and I thonk I'd like to return to this topic later, but ceramic pottery should qualify as well. You take clay...sometimes it's just mud from clay-y soil (Dan and Citrus Heights maybe?), let the mud settle, pour off the water after long enough and you have clay. Great. Once you form the clay into a shape (a cup or bowl, or watever) you can bake it really hot (over 1000F). Then you call it a bisque, and once you dip it into a liquid concoction of powdered metals and bake it again even hotter, what you get is a thing that is durable and awesome, a glass-type surface on a heavy duty, warmth-trapping core.
Anyway, That night I trimmed and then marinated the brisket, Corrie and I mixed up glaze, and then we fired up a whole set of greenware. "Greenware" is what the dried clay bowls are called before they're fired into bisques. You have to 'bisque' the greenware before you can even use the glaze. The firings in the kiln take between eight and ten hours to bisque a thing, and at least another six to eight to cool enough to handle. That night, we fired greenware into bisques that we'd need to glaze and fire into finished pottery, and have cool enough by the Saturday auction. The pieces were auctioned off to raise money for the Farm.
Above is the kiln, red hot inside, about 1400 degrees F, on the start of the cool down mode. This was later on the day I was talking about. Between the brisket, the glaze sifting, and the greenware firing, we didn't get to bed until after 3am. After I woke up and made some breakfast, I headed to check the kiln and got that picture. That was a Wednesday, when everyone would be arriving. Peter and his son Colton made it around 7pm, which was after Carol's return near dinnertime, while Stephanie, Michael, and their son Miles arrived from Austin closer to 9pm.
It was a long day, prefaced by things that had to get done. The brisket had to marinate for at least as long as we did before starting the smoker Friday afternoon (to be ready the next afternoon). The bisques had to be done so they could be glazed by grandkids before getting their firings even later.
Stuff always has to get done.
And Corrie's designing and trying to manage the construction of Ron and Carol's new digs onsite, which adds a nifty wrinkle to the whole endeavor. (It's looking freaking awesome, by the by.)
The times were good, the days long, the devices mostly stowed, and the feeling of accomplishment you get because you're doing something was ever present. That's what I generally fail to imaprt on people I talk to about the Farm trips. It takes twenty hours and we usually bring our cat. It's hot and there are too many bugs and goddamn-bastard-fucking stickers that are terrible, but you get shit done. Every day. Stuff gets done, and it's peaceful. And that's one reason we love it out there.
And when that house gets done...? It's going to be AWESOME!
